Quad Leaders Unveil Maritime Security Initiative to Increase Surveillance in Indo-Pacific

(L–R) Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, U.S. President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi pose for photos at the entrance hall of the Prime Minister’s Office of Japan in Tokyo on May 24, 2022. Zhang Xiaoyu/Reuters

The leaders of the “Quad”—the United States, Japan, Australia, and India—on Tuesday unveiled a maritime security initiative to better track illegal fishing and “dark shipping” in the Indo-Pacific.

The initiative, dubbed the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA), was unveiled during the Quad meeting in Tokyo. It will enable the nations to “fully monitor” and uphold a free and open Indo-Pacific.

“It will allow tracking of ‘dark shipping’ and other tactical-level activities, such as rendezvous at sea, as well as improve partners’ ability to respond to climate and humanitarian events and to protect their fisheries, which are vital to many Indo-Pacific economies,” the White House stated.

“Dark ships” are vessels that switch off their Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponder to avoid detection.

The IPMDA will boost information-sharing across existing regional fusion centers, including those in the Indian Ocean region, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands, according to the White House.

“Through a combination of automatic identification system and radio-frequency technologies, Quad partners can provide an unprecedented ‘common thread’ of activities,” it stated.

“Because of its commercial origin, this data will be unclassified, allowing the Quad to provide it to a wide range of partners who wish to benefit.”

U.S. Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell has said that Washington will announce plans to improve maritime domain awareness, naming illegal fishing as “one of the biggest challenges in the Pacific.”

The statement did not mention China by name, but the move appears to address China’s illicit fishing in the Indo-Pacific.  China has been ranked as the worst offender in the 2021 IUU [illegal, unreported, unregulated] Fishing Index.

Michael Sinclair, a federal executive fellow at the U.S.-based Brookings Institution, said in his 2021 paper that IUU fishing has become a “national security concern” for the United States and its allies around the world.

Sinclair stated that Chinese fishing practices presented “a truly unique and dire IUU threat,” with its vast fishing fleet that has been used to meet its population’s huge demand for protein.

“[China] also provides generous subsidies, which has incentivized the rapid proliferation of larges, capable, ‘distant water’ vessels that can harvest staggering amounts of catch in a single voyage, often by dragging the ocean bottom without regard to fish type, age, or quantity limits,” he said. “When working together in fleets, these vessels are rapacious.”

Several countries in the Indo-Pacific region, particularly the Philippines and Indonesia, chafe at China’s vast fishing fleet, claiming that its vessels often violate their exclusive economic zones and cause environmental damage and economic losses.

Reuters contributed to this report.